VentureBeat

Next month, personalized video-mashup site Big Stage will launch its public beta. The site lets you upload three high-resolution photos of yourself. It then stitches those photos into a 3-D avatar. You can accessorize your avatar and put your avatar into videos and amusing scenery. You can then share it with your friends.

The company got to show off its 3-D avatar technology to the world during Intel CEO Paul Otellini’s keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show back in January. During the keynote, Jonathan Streitzel, chief creative officer of Big Stage, scanned three digital images of himself into the Big Stage site, which constructed a lifelike 3-D avatar of Streitzel. Then Streitzel inserted his avatar, dubbed an @ctor, into a bunch of funny scenes for laughs. He showed how you can insert the avatar into emails, instant messages, and other digital communications.

Now, just ahead of its beta launch, the company is closing an extension to its first round of venture funding, Streitzel said in an interview. The South Pasadena, Calif. company previously raised $4.3 million, however further details on the new funding aren’t available.

The company hopes to make money through advertising, sponsorships, and technology licensing. Streitzel said he also hopes to make 3-D scanning technology a useful consumer tool. It is the result of nine years’ worth of research into stereoscopic reconstruction at the University of Southern California.  The research was aimed at security, but Big Stage owns the rights to the technology outside of that field. Streitzel said that his company is negotiating deals with portals, entertainment companies, social networks, movie studios, and other companies.

Big Stage has 25 employees and was founded in February, 2007. Its initial round of funding came from Mission Ventures, Selby Ventures and Tech Coast Angels.

We’ll see how far it can go with its gag videos and portraits. I always wondered how I would look with a mohawk hair-do. Now I can find out. (I already know what I look like with Jessica Simpson’s hair, thanks to a story I did on HairMixer, which only does hair-morphing).

SodaHead is one of many companies that offers a polling widget that you can embed on a blog or social network. Others include Polldaddy, Pollection, JS-Kit, Vizu, and others. But SodaHead differentiates itself by being focused on social interactions.

Poll Answers

SodaHead pairs polls with features such as discussion forums and Myspace-style user profiles, so users can both vote and discuss the issue presented in the poll, and do things like comment on each others’ profiles.

To demonstrate, here’s a poll with a hot question of the day in the tech blogosphere. Should you, as blogger Robert Scoble thinks, be able to use third-party service Plaxo to remove information from Facebook friends’ email addresses from their profiles (our coverage)? I agree that you should — after all, if somebody both Facebook-friends you and displays their email address on their profile, they are literally sharing it with you already. Not everyone agrees — so, if you want to talk about the issue more, use SodaHead’s forum that comes with this poll. You can either access the forum through the widget or go to it directly, here.

Back to SodaHead, the company. It launched four months ago, and has gained the most traction, it tells us, with musicians and their fans on Myspace. Many artists and managers are looking for new ways to interact with their large Myspace fan bases. Popular acts that use SodaHead include Plain White T’s, My Chemical Romance, Avenged Sevenfold. Others include include Pajamas Media, Hilary Clinton campaigners, OK Magazine, college newspapers and others.

The Los Angeles-based company reports 300,000 monthly unique visitors and 2.4 million monthly page views. It says it has done basically no public relations work, received no press coverage, forged no partnerships and done only limited advertising.

It was founded by Jason Feffer, a former vice president of operations and founding member at Myspace, and Michael Glazer, a former senior vice president of technology at investment bank Jefferies. It has raised $4.3 million from Mohr Davidow Ventures, angel group Tech Coast Angels and prolific angel investor Ron Conway.

Coda Genomics, a Laguna Hills, Calif., biotechnology company founded in 2005, concentrates on a thorny but little-realized challenge in biotechnology: Genetic engineering is easy. Protein manufacture is hard.

The biotech industry was founded on the science of recombinant DNA, which is essentially the trick of taking a gene from one species (such as a human) and inserting it into the genome of another (say, the microbe E. coli). Since many genes are essentially templates for producing proteins, this has been a handy technique for making, or “expressing,” vast quantities of natural human proteins such as insulin by harnessing the production facilities already found inside cells.

Inserted genes, however, don’t always behave as expected. Among other things, their protein-production engines can stutter and sometimes stop when incompatible genetic signals encoded in the transplanted genes clash with the host cell’s own internal machinery. Coda aims to ameliorate such problems by smoothing out the effect of one particular set of crossed signals that control when and for how long cells “pause” the protein-producing activity of individual genes.

The company doesn’t go into a lot of detail as to how it accomplishes this, but it lists an impressive array of blue-chip customers including Genentech, Eli Lilly and Invitrogen, all of whom are keenly interested in ways to improve the manufacture of recombinant proteins as drugs or diagnostics. Coda also sells kits that allow customers to “optimize” synthetic genes — that is, stretches of artificially assembled DNA designed to produce particular proteins — to improve their output once inserted into host cells.

Now, however, it appears that Coda has higher ambitions. The company today announced that it raised $7 million in a third funding round, and hinted that the proceeds will allow it to shop for a drug candidate of its own. (The company’s release calls this “obtain[ing] new high value intellectual property positions, including a therapeutic development candidate.”) I doubt it’s going too far out on a limb to suppose that Coda plans to acquire a cast-off or otherwise “failed” protein drug that’s proven difficult to manufacture in order to make it more cost-effectively.

If so, it’s certainly hard to blame them; the lottery mentality of biotech investors — VCs most certainly included — tends to reward companies that pursue their own drugs while punishing those that might otherwise concentrate on offering useful but unexciting services to other drug manufacturers. I’m not convinced this is the most efficient use of the industry’s resources, but given how little economic logic actually underpins biotechnology in the first place, it seems pretty much par for the course.

There’s more detail on Coda’s early history in this March 2006 VentureWire story (subscription required). OVP Venture Partners led the round, joined by Monitor Ventures, Tech Coast Angels, and Life Science Angels.